Some lung cancer patients across Atlantic Canada are getting a new lease on life, thanks to a cancer testing facility in Halifax.

Staff at the Atlantic Canada Molecular Oncology Centre, which opened about a year ago, have tested about 500 lung cancer specimens from the four Atlantic provinces to determine whether patients would benefit from a targeted cancer treatment.

The test identifies whether patients have a particular gene mutation. If they do, the treatment — a pill taken once or twice a day — can send the cancer into remission and prolong the patient’s life.

And that little pill gets results fast, said the centre’s administrative co-ordinator, Dr. Drew Bethune, also head of the thoracic surgery division at Dalhousie University’s medical school.

“The response of the cancer is very rapid,” Bethune said.

“It can shrink significantly within a couple of weeks of taking the pill.”

Unlike chemotherapy, which kills all dividing cells, the treatment works by specifically targeting cancer cells and “turning off” the mechanism that causes them to grow, he said.

The pill also causes only minimal side-effects, such as skin rashes.

But it doesn’t work for everyone.

That is where staff at the oncology centre come in.

By testing patients’ genes for a particular mutation, they can determine whether the treatment will be effective.

“If they don’t have the mutation, it’s really not very effective and it actually delays getting chemotherapy, which is what they should have,” Bethune said.

“So by doing this testing, we’re avoiding giving patients medications that don’t work for them.”

The centre, a partnership with the National Research Council, Capital Health and pharmaceutical companies, is the only one in Canada that makes the gene mutation test routinely available.

Access to testing at some Canadian hospitals is restricted, and many hospitals must send their specimens to the United States for analysis.

For Nova Scotia, which has about 930 lung cancer patients each year — one of the highest lung cancer rates in Canada, access to the test is important.

The treatment can have a “huge influence” on a patient’s life, Bethune said.

“It doesn’t cure the cancer, but it makes it regress and gives them a better quality of life for a period of time. It can be quite amazing in some patients.”

He said he has seen some lung cancer patients live for seven years with the treatment.

Bethune called the targeted therapy “revolutionary.”

“It means that these principles are going to be applied more and more, and we’re going to be getting customized treatments of all sorts of diseases, not just cancer.”

Treatments based on a similar premise are now coming out for rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and some types of lymphomas.